“Did she tell you what she was going to do with all those babies?” I asked. I could listen to this story only as long as I didn’t think about who the babies really were: me and Cecilia and Fidelia and all the other sister-princesses: Ganelia with her love of architecture and Florencia with her love of numbers and Lydia with her freckles and Elzbethl with her desire to walk without stumbling . . .
Stop, I told myself. Stop thinking about who the babies grew up to become. Or about what happened to them last night. Think of them as nameless, faceless, anonymous orphans. . . .
“Queens don’t explain themselves to lowly servant girls,” Janelia said stiffly. She wrung out a bloody rag and went on with the story. “As much as I thought about it, I guess I thought that her own baby had been sent far away, for safety, and she wanted other babies around her in her last moments as a reminder of new life, even as she slipped away into death.”
From what I had heard about the queen, that sounded like a reasonable guess.
“It took me most of a sleepless night to get all the babies,” Janelia said. “Sneaking in and out of the castle, to and from the orphanage, bringing back a basketful of babies each time. But the queen had been specific—she wanted thirteen babies. And there were only twelve baby girls at the orphanage that night.”
“So why did you not grab a boy for the thirteenth baby?” I asked. “Surely there were boy babies in the orphanage too.”
“Plenty,” Janelia said drily. “But I knew even a dying queen could tell the difference between a baby boy and a baby girl.”
I knew so little of babies that this had not occurred to me.
“And—I had made arrangements to bring in wet nurses for all the babies,” Janelia said.
“Wet nurses?” I repeated numbly.
“Babies have to eat,” Janelia said. “Especially little babies—they cry for food every few hours. And when babies are orphans, of course they don’t have mothers of their own to give them milk. . . .”
My jaw dropped. This was another part of the story I had never thought about. Maybe I had heard somewhere that babies couldn’t eat regular food. But if Janelia brought wet nurses into the palace to feed the babies, that meant even more people knew at least part of the true story from the very beginning.
And there were undoubtedly guards who saw Janelia walking back and forth from the nursery, carrying her mysterious basket, I thought. And probably people at the orphanage who saw what Janelia was doing, who heard her explain the queen’s request . . .
How was it that anything about my sister-princesses and I had stayed secret for longer than five minutes?
How many people had Lord Throckmorton had killed to protect his own claim to power?
How had Janelia survived?
“My own mother was very ill,” Janelia went on. “Our mother. She’d been sick since giving birth to you, and her milk dried up. Whenever I went home, you cried and cried and cried, and I knew that you were starving. . . . I knew that there were wet nurses in the palace with lots of milk, and I knew the queen wanted one more little baby girl to gaze upon before she expired. . . . Can you see why I thought it was an easy decision to bring you to the palace as a stand-in for the thirteenth baby orphan? Can you see why I thought, It will make the queen happy and it will get my baby sister a full belly for the first time in her life and of course this is the right thing to do? Can you ever forgive me my mistake?”
Janelia’s voice was anguished and her face twisted as she spoke the word “mistake.” Her hands dripped with blood.
I found that I could not look at Janelia.
I could not look at my sister—was she truly my sister?
Whether I believed her or not, I needed to act as if I did.
“But then the queen began giving the babies away,” I said, and my voice came out sounding convincingly tortured. “The next morning. Didn’t you see? Knights of the royal order kept coming in secretly, one by one, and the queen handed each one a baby and told him, ‘This is my child. Please take care of my child.’ She convinced each and every knight that he alone had the one true princess. When really he had only an orphan girl. How could you not understand what was going on? How could you not stand with your ear to the door and listen as one baby after another was taken away? How could you have let me go to the worst man of all, Lord Throckmorton?”
I glanced up only long enough to see that Janelia was peering down into the bucketful of bloody water.
“I kept you in the royal nursery until the very last,” Janelia whispered. “I did . . . I did listen at the queen’s door. I heard everything. But I didn’t know how many knights were in the royal order. I don’t know—I guess I didn’t think each and every one of them would come for a baby. I didn’t think the queen would live long enough to give away every baby. I was just thinking about making sure you got as much milk as possible. I was going to leave you suckling until the very last minute, and then, if I had to, I was going to confess to the queen that you were the one baby in her royal nursery who wasn’t an orphan.”
“You never confessed,” I said accusingly.
Janelia peered straight back at me.
“Because, when every other baby was gone from the nursery, a messenger came for me,” she said. “To tell me that my own mother had just died.”
I could imagine Janelia fourteen years ago, standing alone in the hallway of the palace, weeping over her dead mother. I could imagine this so easily because the palace walls had absorbed so many of my own tears, before I had learned that crying did no good.
“But then . . .” I murmured. “Didn’t you have a father who wanted his youngest child back after his wife died? Didn’t I—Don’t I—?”
It was too much of a stretch to work out the connections, to lay claim to a stranger who might once have been father to both Janelia and me.
Janelia was shaking her head anyway.
“Our father died while our mother was yet pregnant with you,” she said. “He died in the war.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Janelia seemed to be trying to work her face into something resembling a weak smile.
“So the truth is, you were an orphan by the time the queen gave you to Lord Throckmorton,” she said.
“Fitting,” I muttered.
Janelia’s expression turned beseeching.
“I didn’t know what Lord Throckmorton was like,” she said. “Not then. I just saw that I had given you to the one knight who was going to keep his baby in the palace, where I could see you. And that I had guaranteed you would continue to get milk and food. Don’t you see that you would have died if I hadn’t let the queen give you away? Died, like . . .” Her eyes darted about, as if she couldn’t find a single place to let her gaze rest comfortably. “Died like our other brothers and sisters when I couldn’t take care of them?”
I winced. I had thought the palace a hard place to grow up, but at least nobody there had talked about death so bluntly. Nobody there had dared to let pain show as nakedly as Janelia was doing right now. Everything bad and ugly at the palace had been muted, prettied up, covered over, hidden.
I had no idea what to do around anyone else’s pain. I closed my eyes. Perhaps now would be a good time to pretend to faint?
I was just thinking about the best way to lower my torso back to the dirt floor without actually hitting my head, when a loud bang startled me into opening my eyes again.
The door of the basement room had swung open so violently it slammed against the wall. Herk and Tog were scrambling back into the room.
“Mam, Mam!” Herk cried, as Tog shoved the door shut again behind them. “They’re saying in the marketplace, they’re saying—”
“They’re saying all the other princesses are dead!” Tog finished for him.
I braced myself, locking my elbows into place.
You already knew from Madame Bisset that this is the rumor the palace officials are spreading, I told myself. That doesn’t mean it’s true. Remember? Palace officia
ls always lie.
But the boys weren’t done.
“And,” Herk said breathlessly. He gulped. “And they’re saying Desmia’s the one who killed them!”
12
My arms buckled and my shoulders slammed against the ground. Was this a real faint? My mind felt so vacant all of a sudden that it seemed possible. But I didn’t lose consciousness. I could see a spider crawling across the beams above me, spinning its web.
I couldn’t be imagining that, I told myself. I couldn’t make up a spider with such intricate detail. . . .
A moment later, Janelia’s face floated into view, hovering above me.
“Desmia, we know that isn’t true,” Janelia said. “We know you wouldn’t have done that.”
How do you know? I wondered. How is it that you think you know me at all? Just because you say we were sisters fourteen years ago—before you gave me away? When you weren’t able to protect me any more than I . . .
I tried to hold it back, but the thought came anyhow . . . than I could protect my sister-princesses?
Janelia wrapped her arms around my shoulder, pulling me back to a seated position. Or, no—was she just trying to hug me?
Herk pulled on my right arm, wrapping it around his own shoulder to help in raising me. Tog stood off to the side watching curiously.
I had a million questions flooding my mind, but I didn’t have the chance to ask any of them before the door to the basement room banged open yet again, and other ragamuffin boys began streaming in.
“Mam, we have news!”
“Mam, I heard—”
“Mam, I have to tell you—”
“Shh! Not until you shut the door!” Janelia called back.
But the door kept banging open again, revealing yet another boy shouting that he had news.
I recoiled, just as I would have if the basement room had been overrun by rats.
“How many sons do you have?” I murmured to Janelia.
It was Herk who answered.
“Oh, none of us are her sons,” he answered. “We just started calling her Mam because she’s the only one who’d take care of us after the orphanage closed.”
My mind stumbled over his words, after the orphanage closed. I didn’t want to think about that right now.
“But you all look alike,” I protested. “Are you at least all brothers?”
“We don’t look alike!” Herk laughed. “Tog has darker hair than me and Jake has crooked teeth and Arno has a big nose, and . . .”
I lost track of all the other differences Herk pointed out. I could see now that the boys did indeed have a variety of features and hair colors and textures—even Herk and Tog, whom I’d at first seen as different-sized versions of the same boy, actually bore little resemblance to one another, except that they were both dirty and dressed in rags.
And, really, hadn’t that been the only thing I’d noticed?
I stopped examining the roomful of boys. Because suddenly they were all examining me.
The door slammed shut a final time. All the boys fell silent. And then one of the smallest ventured, “Is that—”
Janelia beamed so radiantly she practically glowed.
“Yes, this is Desmia,” she announced joyously. “After all these years of having you all watch over her, we have her back.”
“Years of w-watching . . . ,” I stammered.
Janelia turned back to me.
“I didn’t quite make it to that part of the story, did I?” she apologized. “For years I’ve had at least one of the boys posted as a sort of guard near the palace, doing the best they could to watch for you. I tried to get notes to you too, but . . .”
But I never got any of them, I thought. Wonder who always intercepted them?
It had to have been Lord Throckmorton.
Janelia had moved on to a more cheerful topic. She went back to addressing all the boys.
“Herk and Tog saw where Desmia was taken after the fire,” she told them. “And then they rescued her!”
Well, I kind of rescued myself, starting out, I thought with unusual crankiness. At least the part about getting out of the prison house.
I didn’t say anything to the boys but a shy, “Hello.” Several of them dropped to their knees before me, either as a worshipful gesture or as a way to let the boys behind them catch a glimpse too. I was reminded of something out of a fairy tale—maybe that one about the lost princess being greeted by dwarves and woodland creatures?
And how is it that I even know fairy tales? I wondered. Who in my childhood would have taken the time to tell me fanciful, purposeless stories like that?
Why did it seem that it might have been Janelia?
“It would be nice to make introductions,” Janelia said. “To let Desmia know how all of you have been helping me—and her—the past several years. But first—you all say you have news?”
“I heard that Marindia is still alive, and she’s being taken to Fridesia,” the tallest of all the boys said.
“And Elzbethl is alive and being taken to Fridesia,” a curly-haired boy beside him said.
“And Sophia is being taken to Fridesia,” a crooked-toothed boy—perhaps Jake?—agreed.
“Let’s make this go faster,” Janelia said, holding up her hand. “Did all of you hear that the princess you’d been assigned to is still alive and being taken to Fridesia?”
Heads bobbed up and down, the motion lasting long enough that I had time to count . . . eight, nine, ten, eleven . . .
Were they each nodding about a different princess? Did that mean that all the other princesses were accounted for except Cecilia—and I could assume that Cecilia was safe because she was with Harper and already planning to go to Fridesia?
“And did any of you besides Herk and Tog actually see the princess you were assigned to find?” Janelia asked.
Now all the bobbing boy heads changed their motion from up-and-down to side-to-side.
“Did any of you see any of the other princesses?” Janelia asked.
This time the heads just kept shaking side to side. More nos.
“So there’s no proof any of this is true,” I heard Tog mutter, off to the side. “This could be more palace lies.”
“Palace can’t lie when it don’t even exist no more,” the tall boy who’d reported on Marindia taunted.
“The people who burned down the palace could still lie,” Tog retorted. “There can still be palace liars without a palace.”
Back at the palace, I had been taught to have the patience to practice minuets and études on the pianoforte for hours on end. I’d been taught to have patience to make small talk through court dinners where each course could last an hour. On my own, I’d learned to have patience to hide for entire days in the secret passageways, spying on meetings of palace officials where the one detail I wanted to know could be buried in boring discourses about the rising price of flaxseed or the productivity of tin mines.
But I found I had no patience for listening to these two boys argue. Not here. Not now.
I started to rise up by pushing back against Janelia and Herk.
“If the rumors are either that I killed all my sister-princesses—which I know isn’t true—or they are all still alive and being taken to Fridesia,” I began, “then I’m going to Fridesia to find them. And rescue them!”
It had been awkward enough sitting in front of all these boys in nothing but a nightgown. But I felt even more ungainly trying to squirm into an upright position when every motion made my legs and feet scream with pain. I managed to raise myself onto my left knee and gingerly began sliding my right foot back into position.
Is it safe to put any weight on the ball of my foot? I wondered. The heel? The tips of my toes?
Just touching my foot to the ground brought such stabbing pain that I lost my balance and toppled over backward.
Janelia, Herk, and Tog dived to catch me.
“Desmia, you can’t go to Fridesia right now,” Tog told me, clinging to m
y arm. “You can’t even stand up!”
I lifted my chin—evidently the only part of my body I was capable of lifting without pain.
“Then,” I said, “someone will carry me.”
13
The room exploded in chatter—how could these boys talk so loudly in such a small room? Were they agreeing or disagreeing? Who could tell?
It didn’t matter. I knew I was going to get what I wanted as soon as I saw Janelia’s face.
She feels guilty for leaving me in Lord Throckmorton’s clutches when I was a defenseless baby, I told myself. Whether or not the story she told me is true, she seems to believe it. And she needs to act like she believes it. So I can use that to get her to do anything I want.
I felt guilty thinking that. Back at the palace, everybody manipulated everybody else; it was as natural as breathing. You figured out who had power and who had secrets and who could accomplish what you wanted—and if you didn’t have enough power to get what you wanted, you used your knowledge of the secrets your target wouldn’t want revealed. Lord Throckmorton had been the cruelest and most extreme manipulator in the entire palace, but manipulation might as well have been the coin of the realm. I had seen maids manipulate submaids, chefs manipulate sous chefs. I’d always assumed that the lowest of the low—the stable boys who mucked out the palace horse stalls, perhaps, or the scullery girls who peeled potatoes down in the kitchen—simply took their manipulation out of the palace, lording their palace positions over the peasants outside who were never allowed past the palace gates.
But Janelia had been the lowly scullery girl peeling potatoes in the kitchen, and even though she now seemed to run an entire network of ragamuffin boy spies, somehow I couldn’t believe that she’d used manipulation to achieve that position.
No, Janelia somehow seemed . . . sincere.